Teacher Leadership in the Classroom

Abstract

Teachers exhibit and exercise leadership in their professional practice, explicitly and implicitly, and this became even more acute during the global pandemic. Teacher leadership is however not a new phenomenon, and over the past 20 years there have been efforts to describe and typologize it. Terms such as teacher leadership, teachers-leaders, leadership for learning, and learning leaders have been set out in professional standards for teaching, though the translation from policy into practice varies across education systems and contexts. If leadership expectations have intensified, then the question arises of when and where should learning for leadership in education occur? In general, this has been associated with a model of positional leadership, so leadership learning and preparation is role related. Discourses of distributed leadership and empowerment in the teaching profession all point toward the need for leadership learning in initial teacher education as a foundation for teachers leading learning in their classrooms and wider school. This chapter discusses this, drawing on examples from Scotland and Russia where the authors are based, showing how this is being developed though undergraduate and postgraduate curricula. The chapter concludes by arguing if leadership is increasingly being seen as a teacher responsibility, then there is a counter responsibility to ensure new teachers are adequately prepared for the leadership they will enact and experience.